Social Games Design Workshop

Workshop: Game Design for Social Networks

@ MindTrek, Oct 2nd, 2009

Aki Järvinen, PhD

mygamestudies.com / IT University of Copenhagen

Aki’s Background

Resume at Prezi.com

The focus: 50 million

active monthly

users

Concept design

process for the day

Idea production:

Quantity breeds quality

From Idea evaluation

to Concept design & iteration

Design template to

structure your concept

design task

Takeaway: High level documen-tation to

communicate your idea

Concept presentation:

Articulating your design & reflecting on

your decisions

Programme

•  10.00: Introduction to workshop and participants

•  10.15 Lecture: The Design and Business of Networked Play

•  11.00 break

•  11.15 Exercise: Brainstorming social network game mechanics

•  11.45 Exercise debrief & Introduction to design templates

•  12.00 Lunch Break

Programme •  12.30 Introduction: Design Drivers & Patterns for Social Games

•  13.00 Exercise: Social Game Design

•  13.30 Exercise: Designing the Service Aspect

•  14.00 Coffee break

•  14.30 Iterating the Game Concept & Preparing game concept presentations

•  15.00 Concept presentations & Evaluations

•  15.45 Workshop debrief & closing

Concept design

process for the day

Let’s get it done

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lizhenry/3489717185/

The Design and Business of Networked Play

Focus of the day • Not: the ‘games people play’

in social networks

• Yes: Game applications for social networks

•  In particular: Facebook

Business of ‘social games’

• Zynga, the market leader in social game development, aims at 1 million $ revenue per day

• Reportedly they are half way there

Success factors

• For a social game, he said success is driven by by virality, engagement, and monetization. “Each of these variables you can effect over time. None of them are fixed [variables].”

- PlayFish COO

Top Applications 2009-09-30

http://www.appdata.com

Top Games Applications 2009-09-30

http://www.appdata.com

Top Game Application Developers 2009-09-30

http://www.appdata.com

Social Networks

There are also other big fish in the sea

Zynga’s recipe for

success

• A company’s success on Facebook revolves around three factors:

•  ability to maximize viral channels (to drive new users),

•  the ability to create an effective internal engagement loop within an application, and

•  access to an open communication channel with Facebook’s platform people.

Networked Play Motivations, Qualities, Design

What is ‘Game

Design’, anyway?

• ‘game design’ is ‘the process of designing the content and rules of a game.

• also used to describe both the game design embodied in an actual game as well as documentation that describes such a design.

• This is indeed what the workshop is about, but...

Social Game Design goes

beyond game design as we

know it

•  Into the realm of Interaction design:

•  ‘Interaction design is the art of facilitating interactions between humans through products and services.’ (Dan Saffer)

• And, furthermore...

Social Game Design goes

beyond game design as we

know it

•  Into the realm of Service Design:

•  ‘A service is a chain of activities that form a process and have value for the end user.’

•  service design focuses on context, i.e. ‘the entire system of use’.

Motivations for social

media use (Benkler)

• Social connectedness,

• Psychological well-being,

• Gratification,

• Material gain

• All these can be facilitated through designing play, and games

Four motivations

for contributing

in online communities

• Peter Kollock (1999) has defined four motivations for contributing in online communities:

•  Reciprocity,

•  Reputation,

•  Increased sense of efficacy, and

•  Attachment to and need of a group.

Designing opportunities for players to express their

motives

• = designing social game mechanics as means of interaction that allow players to express their motives

Playful qualities of

network use (adapted

from Rao)

•  Inherent Sociability

• Spontaneity

• Symbolic Physicality

• Narrativity

• Asynchronicity

Inherent sociability

Spontaneity

Symbolic Physicality

Narrativity

Asynch-ronicity

Social Game Design

Framework

Designing Networked, Social Play:

Beyond game design

Design: Breakdown

Design: Breakdown

Design: Breakdown

Design: Breakdown

Design: Breakdown

Design: Breakdown

Designing Social Game Concepts Getting it done

Exercise #1

Add description of your game mechanic here

Design: Breakdown

Identifying motivations->

designing mechanics in a

way that allows them to become

ways for players to express and enact their motivations

VNA gives you starting

points for designing

your mechanics

http://gamelab.uta.fi/gamespacetool/

Social game mechanics:

Designing interaction loops where players

use verbs towards goals, and the

network responds

Exercise #1

Add description of your game mechanic here

Exercise #2

Designing for the network, for the

casual mindset, and how it is virally

engaged into play –even how do you

copywrite your notifications might

matter substantially

Design: Breakdown

Design: Breakdown

Design: Breakdown

1-click accessibility

to support spontaneity

Press the bu*on to rescue the princess. 

Rescue Princess 

Daniel Cook http://www.lostgarden.com

Compressing complex

sequences of events into 1

click

Daniel Cook http://www.lostgarden.com

Social Game Design

Patterns

Pattern: Feed

propagation

Social Game Design

Patterns

Feed propagation, case example

from FarmVille

Appealing to players’ empathy

Feed propagation

supports discussion

Social Game Design

Patterns

Pattern: Chain letter

quests

Service / Propagation

Design Patterns

Pattern: Notifications

Service / Propagation

Design Patterns:

Anti-Pattern: Request

Flood

LinkedIn: The Quest

Design: Breakdown

Exercise #1 debrief

• Activity is more important than actual result

• We aim at Quality through quantity

Social Game Design

Framework

Exercise #3

Social networks shift playtesting towards

metric-driven feature optimization and

constant deployment loop

Design: Breakdown

Design: Breakdown

Day’s process &

results

Feedback & Contact

• Aki Järvinen, Ph.D.

• +358 40 504 1367

• aki@mygamestudies.com

• Twitter: @aquito

• www.mygamestudies.com

• games4networks.posterous.com